Against the Wind

by J. F. Freedman

  I’m on my feet. I don’t know how I feel; livid, outraged. Betrayed.

  “Want to tell me about it now?” I slam my fist so hard on the table they jump. “All I ask is the truth,” I yell. “The simple, unvarnished truth. I’d defend you with the truth, even if you’re flat-out guilty. But now I can’t.”

  “We told you the truth.” Lone Wolf stares up at me.

  “My ass.” I close their folder. “Call some other chump. I don’t tolerate being lied to.”

  “We told you the truth,” he repeats, staring hard at me. “We told you the fucking truth!”

  We’re both on our feet now, screaming at each other.

  “You’re a lying sack of shit!” I yell at him. “All of you!”

  “It’s the truth!” he yells back, equally enraged. “We don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

  I look at the others. They’re pale, silent. I don’t know if this is an admission of guilt, of being caught in the lie, or the shock of hearing what I just told them about the connection between Rita and the murdered man.

  “You took her up to the hills,” I say.

  “That’s right.”

  “Where the victim was found.”

  He stares at me. “We don’t know anything about that.”

  “And then you brought her back to the motel,” I press on. I’m racing. “And you fucked her again; with her consent, of course,” I add, biting it off.

  “Yes.”

  “And during all this time you never saw the victim. Richard Bartless.”

  “Is that his name?” Goose asks, almost timidly.

  “Was,” I correct him.

  “We didn’t do it.” Roach speaks up. “We didn’t. On a stack of Bibles that’s the truth.”

  They’re in county jumpsuits again. They look scared.

  “It’s too coincidental,” I say, shaking my head; is it distrust or is there also panic in all this: my panic at trying what might turn out to be a hopeless case. “I just don’t know how I can believe you.”

  They sag; even Lone Wolf.

  “I’ve got work to do,” I tell them. Christ, when Robertson finds out about this, which he will and soon, I’ll be the laughingstock of the entire state. The idea of having to look at Andy and Fred is excruciating.

  “What’re you going to do?” Lone Wolf asks.

  “I don’t know.” I look at them. The anger’s subsiding, a slow, petering-out leak.

  “You gonna quit us?”

  “Give me a reason why I shouldn’t.”

  “Because we didn’t do it.”

  We stare at each other. The four of them, behind bars. Me, looking through them.

  “I’ll talk to you later. If I have anything to talk to you about.” I scoop up my papers and leave them.

  The truth is, I can’t quit. If things were on an even keel at the firm, and if Patricia hadn’t exploded her bomb in my face, and if I wasn’t about to finalize with Holly (I was moronically generous; Fred, who was handling my side, told me I was crazy, but I just wanted it over, how was I supposed to know the bottom was going to drop out?), and if all the other things that’ve come up to conspire to destroy me weren’t present, maybe I would. But these four are all I have now. Their case’ll carry me financially (a shitty, unjustice-like thought, but there it is), and buy me time to figure things out. Deep down I know it’ll never be the same with Andy and Fred. Even if I hadn’t blown them out in my childish fit of self-righteousness and one-upmanship, the door had been shut as soon as they did what they did. I’m going to have to start fresh, not the worst thing in the world given my reputation as a trial lawyer, but scary all the same.

  Besides, I don’t like to abandon clients. I never have, even when I had every right to a couple of times, when their lies blew up in my face. I still believe that old bromide that every client deserves the best defense he can get, no matter how society views him. And I like this kind of case: I like clients like these, dangerous fringe players, who stand for so much we abhor, who scare us, make us want to run for cover. I run for cover as much as the next guy, so when I have the chance to stand on my hind legs and howl a little I go for it; it’s liberating.

  And maybe they are telling the truth. That’s happened before, too.

  MY CIRCLE IS DRAWING increasingly closer. Patricia’s house, the bar, the bottle-blonde’s place, now the motel where Rita Gomez works. I thought I’d escaped all this; if not twenty-odd years ago, when I left home without ever looking back, then certainly when the partnership came together.

  Like everything else about my life these days, I was wrong.

  I park along the side, out of sight of the office, locking the car with the alarm, something I rarely do. I don’t want to deal with the management; they’ll bullshit me and if they run true to form they’ll can the girl for bringing trouble around. As I’m the bikers’ lawyer, she’s not going to cotton to me anyway; that’s enough reason not to alienate her any more than she already has been.

  It’s an old-fashioned auto court, sixteen units, kitchen included. All in need of paint and sundry repairs. I smell the septic backup. Later in the day, when the sun’s had a chance to bake it, it’ll be inordinately fragrant. The place reminds me of summer vacation trips, when my father would pile us into his Hudson and we’d go to what’s now called the Redneck Riviera, the north Florida, Alabama, Mississippi Gulf Coast. I hear it’s chic now; then it was where you went if you were from that part of the country and had nowhere else to go but thought you had to get away and see water. It bought a vacation so similar to what was at home that except for the sand, which oozed tar-oil from the pumping platforms miles off, faint in the hazy distance, and the tepid, mosquito-ridden water, you couldn’t tell the difference. After three of them we stopped going and bought a color television instead.

  Inside an open door I see a young woman vacuuming. She senses my presence but chooses to ignore it.

  “Hey,” I call out. I can’t play games with her, I’ve got to get this thing going.

  She squints out at me. With the sun at my back I’m a dark shape to her. Even so, she knows I’m not a customer: I’m too well-dressed and I’m not with a woman.

  “Yeh?” Her voice is whiny, belligerent, cautious.

  “Can I talk to you?”

  “What about?”

  “If you shut that goddam machine down I’ll tell you.” Jesus Christ, do I have to eat shit from everybody?

  She shuts it off; there’s authority in my voice, she’s not going to push it further.

  “Thank you.” Just enough tinge of sarcasm to let her know I know she’s playing a game.

  “What do you want?” she whines. “I got work to do, I’m behind already, I’m the only one on today, bastards left me short.”

  “I’m looking for Rita Gomez,” I say.

  She stares at me. I’ve scared her.

  “Are you her?”

  She shakes her head, fast. “Do I look like her?” she offers.

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “I’ve never met her.”

  “How come you’re looking for her then?”

  “I’ve got some questions to ask her,” I say. At this rate we’ll be here until sundown. “Just a few, it won’t take long.”

  “You a cop?”

  I pause. “No. Why?”

  “Then what do you want her for?” she says, throwing it back at me.

  “Because I have some questions and I think she might have some answers. Why would you think I’m the law?” I add, starting to grow more suspicious than I already am. “Don’t regular people come to see her? Her friends?”

  “You don’t look like any friend of hers.”

  She isn’t giving an inch. If she’d been casual and told me Rita wasn’t around I probably would have turned and left. Now I have to press.

  “Do you know where she is now?” I ask, trying a different tack.

  “No.”

  “Doesn’t she live here?”

  “Yeh,
she lives here. But she ain’t here now.”

  “When do you expect her?”

  She shrugs.

  “When does she have to be at work?” I press.

  “Right now. Why do you think I’m so far fucking behind?”

  “So she’s AWOL,” I say.

  “She’s what?”

  “Not here when she’s supposed to be.”

  She smiles. She never had the benefit of three thousand dollars’ worth of orthodontia.

  “Yeh,” she says.

  Enough of this. I walk into the room, shut the door. She backs away from me. It’s dark, the floor-length curtains are closed against the heat.

  “You’re not supposed to be in here,” she tells me. “That door’s supposed to be left open when I’m cleaning.”

  “For the last time. Where is she?” I ask, louder now. “Don’t make me play bullshit games. I don’t have the time and you’re not worth it.”

  She’s scared; she holds the vacuum hose like a weapon.

  “I don’t know. Honest. I don’t know where they took her.”

  Bingo. On somebody else’s card.

  “Who? Who took her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’d I just say?” I take a step closer.

  “Some guys,” she says quickly, almost stumbling as she moves away from me. “Two of them.”

  “When?”

  “Last night. Around ten or eleven.”

  “Cops?” I ask.

  “I don’t know.” She hesitates; I take a step closer. Now she’s cornered. “Yeh. They didn’t say; but they were, for sure.”

  This is why I’m in the position I’m in: last night while I was drinking and getting laid, pretending to be working hard and getting information, two cops did the job the way it’s supposed to be done and got to Rita Gomez first.

  “And you don’t know where they all went?” I ask.

  She shakes her head.

  “I thought they were taking her to jail.”

  “Jail?” How far behind am I? I think. Maybe Fred and Andy are right, maybe I really am losing it.

  “For questioning about Richard. You know,” she says, her voice heavy with disgust, “the dumb shit who was sniffing around her and got his sorry ass killed.”

  What kind of man was he, I think, that this girl should be so contemptuous of him? That even to someone like her he should be such a loser?

  The police go through Santa Fe like a whirlwind. Every bar, motel, homeless jungle, blood bank, temporary employment agency, street corner, the works, they move through the city in waves, Moseby coordinating it, Sanchez and Gomez are the lead-team but every available cop is requisitioned, thrown into the mix. If they can hang the bikers so much the better, it would make for a more politically spectacular trial and ensure attention, and ultimately, conviction: Moseby knows without Robertson’s having to tell him that if they can put together enough evidence to go to the grand jury and come out with an indictment the rest will be a downhill slide. But the main thrust is to find the killer. So far there hasn’t been undue publicity. Robertson makes sure the proper spin is put on it: internal gang-style warfare that got out of hand and resulted in unfortunate but predictable retribution. He keeps the more grisly details away from the public. The press has bought it for the present; once an arrest is formally made and pre-trial gets underway the manipulation will begin, until, by the time the trial starts, the accused will be seen as a social pariah, a mad dog fit only for slaughter. This scenario is common, it’s always played out this way in this type of murder. No one, except the accused and his defense attorney, ever questions it. And their reasons, of course, although most of the time futile, are obvious and self-serving.

  As it turns out, Sanchez and Gomez are the ones to hit the jackpot. They’d gone to the Dew Drop Inn but struck out; they were cops, they didn’t hide it, nobody gave them the time of day. They left knowing the bikers had been there (almost meaningless, as the bikers were in dozens of places in the general time period) and took with them some girl who did or did not work in a motel, depending on who contradicted who. And that maybe the victim and the bikers had all been in the bar the night before, and maybe got into a beef about a bad dope deal, and maybe went outside and discussed it further; this was very much in dispute, it could just as easily have been somebody else who went out back with the victim, on a different night altogether. It was remembered that the victim’s mouth made promises his fists couldn’t deliver.

  The ninth motel is the payoff. The girl is in terrible distress, she can’t stop the hemorrhaging, she’s tried home remedies because she was afraid to go to the hospital and have to make up a believable story about what happened. They dutch-uncle her, she could’ve died, didn’t she realize that? She’s too weak to resist, yes they’re cops and of course they’d appreciate any help she could give them but their main concern right now is getting her taken care of.

  At the hospital, where you absolutely can’t fix the records, they fix them. (To guarantee, they tell her, that her assailants can’t find out she went to the authorities.) So when she leaves with them several hours later, weak but professionally patched-up, carrying a plastic bag stuffed with antibiotics, she’s never been there officially. And since she’s never been there officially, no one’s officially questioned her, gotten any information from her.

  And then she disappears, and for five days nobody sees her.

  ROBERTSON CALLS ME UP. “They’ll be arraigned tomorrow morning.”

  “It’s about time,” I tell him, somewhat testy and not bothering to cover it. “This could’ve been done three days ago.”

  “Three days ago I didn’t have a judge.” The bastard’s so damn calm; I can feel the chill over the line.

  “What’s the charge?” I ask. I know he doesn’t have anything, the grand jury hasn’t been convened.

  “Accessory to murder.”

  “That’s bullshit!” I explode. “You don’t have a goddam thing do you? You’re just hanging onto them so the papers don’t cream you. Goddam it, John,” I continue, lowering my voice and attitude, “this is wrong. You know it. This isn’t like you. Why are you doing this?” I don’t want to say ‘to me,’ but it’s there, hanging in the space that’s between us and growing wider.

  “Don’t take it so personally, Will,” he admonishes. “You’ll be happier and probably live longer.”

  “I’m not sure I want to live longer,” I say. “Come on, John. If you don’t have anything on them don’t do this. It’s beneath the dignity of your office, as well as your own personal code,” I add, trying to guilt-trip him just a smidgen.

  “Accessory to murder,” he repeats, not taking the lure. “We have enough to book them on those charges as defined by the state. And we’re going to do better than that,” he adds with equanimity.

  The only thing better than that is murder one, but when a prosecutor, especially one who’s ostensibly a friend, quotes scripture, you roll with the punches. What bothers me more than anything is that John is by nature a cautious person. That’s why he’s on his side of the law. He rarely goes out on a limb; so his telling me as forthrightly as he’s doing that he thinks he can bring murder one is unnerving. Maybe that’s the intent: he knows I’m vulnerable right now, maybe he’s setting the groundwork for a plea-bargain.

  “Okay,” I relent. “What’s the tariff?”

  “I’m recommending a million.”

  “What!” I scream.

  “Cash bond. Apiece. I’m reasonably sure the judge’ll see it that way. These are dangerous men, Will, we don’t want them skipping on us.”

  I exhale. My clients have as much chance of posting a million-dollar cash bond, singularly or collectively, as I do of being the first astronaut to go to Saturn.

  “Why do you have to be such a prick about this?” I ask when I’ve calmed down enough so I don’t rage anymore over the phone.

  “Because they killed a man,” he answers. “And I want to make sure they st
ick around to pay the price.”

  “State your name for the members of the grand jury please.”

  “Rita Gomez.”

  “Your age.”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “And your occupation.”

  “I’m a maid at the Old Adobe Motel.”

  “In Santa Fe?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And where do you live?”

  “At the motel. They been letting me use a unit, seeing’s how they don’t usually fill up this time of year.”

  “How long have you lived there?”

  “About three months.”

  “And before that?”

  “Las Cruces. That’s where I’m from. Originally.”

  “In your own words, Miss Gomez, would you please tell the members of the grand jury what occurred on the night of July twenty-first of this year.”

  “Yes sir. I was out at this bar. The Dew Drop Inn. I went with Richard but he got ornery and had to leave.”

  “Richard Bartless? The murder victim?”

  “Yes sir. He’d been staying at the motel a couple days so we got to know each other.”

  “Continue please.”

  “Anyway Richard was with this other guy who claimed to be a dope-dealer or something and Richard started giving these guys some shit and they called him out …”

  “These guys? Are you referring to the four men commonly known as Lone Wolf, Roach, Goose, and Dutchboy?”

  “Yes sir. Those four.”

  “Go on.”

  “So they were out in the parking lot and he saw he wasn’t gonna do nothing but get his ass kicked for him so he ran off and left me there. So then everybody went back inside and hung around until it was time to close and the one they call Lone Wolf said does anybody need a ride home? And I said I did ’cause they’d scared Richard off he was my ride so Lone Wolf said he’d give me a ride home back to the motel so I went with them.”

  “Did they take you back to the motel?”

  “No sir.”

  “Where did they take you?”

  “They took me by the motel and I said this is it but they didn’t stop they kept going. Up to the mountains, they didn’t stop until we got up there about halfways so then they stopped.”